I was shocked and saddened to open up my newspaper recently and see that Lester Pannell had passed away. I didn’t know him well personally. He was a teacher in the Lebanon school system when I was a student but I wasn’t in any of his classes. I remember seeing him occasionally when he was in my husband’s barbershop years ago and recall especially his distinctive voice. But I learned to know about him through his newspaper columns on birding and it was what I discovered about him there that gave me great respect for him and made me feel like I knew him. He was a man of great passion. His passion was learning about and seeking out different birds. Now I care nothing about birds except that they are part of God’s beautiful creation. I barely know a turkey from a parakeet, but I always read Mr. Pannell’s column just for the experience of soaking up his passion for them. In the 2001 movie “Serendipity”, the character Dean says “The Greeks never wrote obituaries. When a man died, the